Quotes from Stephen Hawking

This result was very convenient for Marxist—Leninist dialectical materialism

Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don't just give up.

There is no time to wait for Darwinian evolution to make us more intelligent and better natured. But we are now entering a new phase of what might be called self-designed evolution, in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA.

You can call the universe many things — awesome, beautiful, violent — but one thing you can't call it is cramped.

people don't seem too worried about a possible end twenty billion years in the future. You can do quite a lot of eating, drinking and being merry before that.

the universe is not infinite in space, but neither does space have any boundary.

Economics is also an effective theory, based on the notion of free will plus the assumption that people evaluate their possible alternative courses of action and choose the best. That effective theory is only moderately successful in predicting behavior because, as we all know, decisions are often not rational or are based on a defective analysis of the consequences of the choice. This is why the world is in such a mess.

The laws of physics demand the existence of something called 'negative energy'.

If you fall towards a black hole feet first, gravity will pull harder on your feet than your head, because they are nearer the black hole. The result is that you will be stretched out lengthwise, and squashed in sideways. If the black hole has a mass of a few times our Sun, you would be torn apart and made into spaghetti before you reached the horizon.

It is a matter of common experience that things get more disordered and chaotic with time.

Aristotle, and most of the other Greek philosophers, on the other hand, did not like the idea of a creation because it smacked too much of divine intervention.

in a famous paper in 1905, a hitherto unknown clerk in the Swiss patent office, Albert Einstein, pointed out that the whole idea of an ether was unnecessary, providing one was willing to abandon the idea of absolute time.